Alan Jacobs

Lucas Cranach explains that it’s all about the Gesetz and the Gnade

[Peter’s horrified reaction at Jesus’ washing of his feet] is the reaction of normal human nature. That the disciple should wash his master’s feet is normal and proper. But if the master becomes a menial slave to the disciple, then all proper order is overturned…. All of us except those at the very bottom have a vested interest in keeping it so, for as long as we duly submit to those above us we are free to bear down on those below us. The action of Jesus subverts this order and threatens to destabilize all society. Peter’s protest is the protest of normal human nature.

… This is not just an acted lesson in humility; Peter could have understood that…. The foot washing is a sign of that ultimate subversion of all human power and authority which took place when Jesus was crucified by the decision of the “powers” that rule this present age. In that act the wisdom of this world was shown to be folly, and the “powers” of this world were disarmed (Col 2:15). But “flesh and blood” — ordinary human nature — is in principle incapable of understanding this. It is “to the Jew a scandal, to the Greek folly.” Only those whom the risen Christ will call and to whom the Holy Spirit will be given will know that this folly is the wisdom of God, and this weakness is the power of God. At that moment, as the man he is, Peter cannot understand. The natural man makes gods in his own image…. How can the natural man recognize the supreme God in the stooping figure of a slave, clad only with a loincloth?

Through browser extensions, Privly allows you to post to social networks and send email without letting those services see “into” your text. Instead, your actual words get encrypted and then routed to Privlys servers (or an eventual peer-to-peer network). What the social media site “sees” is merely a link that Privly expands in your browser into the full content. Of course, this requires that people who want to see your content also need Privly installed on their machines… .

What’s intriguing about all this is that it, as McGregor puts it, violates many assumptions we have about the way the web works. When we post to a site, we are used to that site controlling whatever it is that we’ve sent to them. That seemed like the tradeoff you had to make in exchange for a service like Facebook. But McGregor and his team argue that it’s simply not necessary to give away that level of control. And they are building the technology to prove it.

For too long, publishers have been worrying about the wrong thing, chasing pie-in-the-sky DRM that has never worked at stopping piracy, and will never work. In the process, they’ve fashioned a scourge for their own industry—a multimillion-dollar liability that their customers will have to absorb in order for publishers to get back any leverage at the bargaining table. And every book you allow a tech company to sell with DRM only increases that liability.

Nowadays, we love monsters; and Fantasy as a mode loves monsters to the exclusion of almost everything else. Writers have made whole careers finding ways of delivering weirder and gnarlier monsters to their readership; and producers evidently believe that the way to make Wrath of the Titans (in cinemas soon!) even better than its big-budget predecessor Clash of the Titans is to make the monsters bigger, toothier and more photo-realistic. The problem is: it’s not true. Our response to such SFX is one of disinterested curiosity, not primal terror. But the alternative aesthetic approach—that monsters are only scary if they are embedded in an eloquently realised society, culture and language, is anathema to a lot of fantasy, which prefers to sketch its world and populate it characters who are essentially modern folk in medieval fancy dress.

But the Internet-in-a-suitcase doesn’t work. In a test at the Occupy D.C. protests last fall, activists found that even when their routers were running smoothly, when they tried to connect to the broader Internet, it was too slow to be of any use. In an increasingly cloud-based Internet, any LAN is severely hobbled without access to the broader Net. Applications such as Gmail, Twitter and YouTube require what engineers call backhaul, or a connection to the Internet’s global infrastructure. The problem isn’t the construction of a single network, but rather a working internetwork, one that links to the existing infrastructure of a nation’s telecommunications system—precisely the ones under the strictest control. An Internet-in-a-suitcase risks being the connectivity equivalent of a gleaming new warship with no way of getting to open water. A LAN may still be useful for limited communication, but not if the revolution is to be tweeted.

While readers familiar with Wallace’s Kenyon speech will find that most of the content has maintained intact, This is Water does include a single, but very substantial, revision that has raised some criticism. Following Wallace’s point about the mind being a “good servant and a terrible master,” Wallace states in the original speech: “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.” In This is Water, the final sentence from the quote above was taken out. This line was, in fact, a go-to line for the authors of many of Wallace’s obituaries, who see in this moment an ominous foreshadowing of his eventual suicide. For Tom Bissell, the textual excision is understandable because “Any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace’s work…now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it.” Thus, Bissell suggest that the oft-cited line might distract readers from the core elements of the speech.

Reception of the posthumously-published edition of Wallace’s speech has been divided in ways that point to, on one hand, the lasting power of the content of his speech, but also a concern about its place and meaning of a society that has had to “commence” going on without him. While reviews of the content of the speech have been almost uniformly positive, there has been criticism of the format of This is Water. After all, one may ask, does the omission of the line “they shoot the terrible master” and the stretching out of Wallace’s prose into sentence units refigure and protect an image of Wallace as the “Wise old fish?” Zach Baron of the Village Voice points out that lines like “I am not the wise old fish,” take on the feeling of zen mantras, certainly gaining emphasis, but perhaps doing so in the wrong way. Ultimately, he cannot shake the feeling that the format goes against the principles of the speech: “The net effect is to imply an entirely different kind of wisdom–of the Tuesdays With Morrie variety–than whatever actual wisdom is contained therein. ” Fans of the book, on the other hand, including the most “liked” Amazon review of the text, argue that the book format finally gives the speech the “stature it deserves,” and argue that the knee-jerk resistance tot he speech is evidence of the kind of cynicism that Wallace speaks out against in the speech. These debates also inevitably intersect with the question of whether Wallace’s speech was mostly to be taken as a survival guide to life within modern capitalism or an affirmation of it.

— viz.

The bandwidth is available, the images are there, and the robots and digital devices get plenty of look-in. Where did the people go? Where is the aura, where is the credibility? Are robots with cameras supposed to have our credibility for us? They don’t.

We’re not going to be able to gloss over this gaping vacuity by “making the machines our friends.” Because they’re not our friends. Machines are never our friends, even if they’re intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day. They may very well be our algorithmic investors, but they’re certainly not our art critics, because at that, they suck even worse than they do at running our economy.

If machine vision was our pal, then we wouldn’t need James Bridle to assert that for us. We’d have an infallible Bridlebot, a Googleized visual search-engine that could generate as much aesthetics as we want.

That won’t happen. Why not? Because it is impossible. It’s as impossible as Artificial Intelligence, which is a failed twentieth-century research campaign, reduced to a sci-fi conceit. That’s why the “New Aesthetic” isn’t about “robot vision” from “digital devices,” even when it claims that, as a rhetorical gesture to grant itself some aura.

The New Aesthetic is comprehensible. It’s easier to perceive than, for instance, the “surrealism” of a fur-covered teacup. Your Mom could get it. It’s funny. It’s pop. It’s transgressive and punk. Parts of it are cute.

It’s also deep. If you want to get into arcane matters such as interaction design, computational aesthetics, covert surveillance, military tech, there’s a lot of room for that activity in the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic carries a severe, involved air of Pynchonian erudition.

It’s contemporary. It’s temporal rather than atemporal. Atemporality is all about cerebral, postulated, time-refuting design-fictions. Atemporality is for Zenlike gray-eminence historian-futurist types. The New Aesthetic is very hands-on, immediate, grainy and evidence-based. Its core is a catalogue of visible glitches in the here-and-now, for the here and for the now.

It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.

At some point when I was reading a long note—I think, given the tweet I sent out, it must have been note 110—I actually became so confused by how long it was going on that I wondered if there’d been some sort of coding error and I was actually in the main text. And then when the notes to the notes started appearing9 I became even more disoriented and even though the location indicator showed that I was all the way in the back of the “book”, since there was no “book” for me to flip pages through, that didn’t really convince me that I wasn’t in the main text. And since I hadn’t bookmarked the page I had been reading, the page with the link to the note I was now wandering through, there wasn’t any way for me to go back to where I was. I could only go forward, reading and reading until I got to the safety of “return to text.”

After that point, every time I saw a numbered note, I wondered if it was going to be a short one or if it was going to take me down some rabbit hole. But I made a conscious decision not to care. I refused to bookmark the page I was currently reading. I gave in to the book, went where it led me, and trusted I would make my way back to where I was and that DFW would give me the help and pleasure I needed to keep going. I ceded all my authority to Infinite Jest.